What is Lean?

[Monirul Islam]

The core idea of lean manufacturing is actually quite simple...relentlessly work on eliminating waste from the manufacturing process.

So what is waste? Waste is defined as any activity that does not add value from the customer's perspective. According to research conducted by the Lean Enterprise Research Centre (LERC), fully 60% of production activities in a typical manufacturing operation are waste – they add no value at all for the customer.

The good news is that just about every company has a tremendous opportunity to improve, using lean manufacturing techniques and other manufacturing best practices. Techniques that enable you to deliver higher quality products at significantly lower costs. Now that is something to get excited about!

It can be difficult to find reliable and well-written information about improvement techniques for manufacturing. So, our goal is to provide you with the absolute best source of easy-to-understand information for helping you improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability of your manufacturing operations.

With that in mind, we have designed each topic on this site to be self-contained and to stand on its own. If you want to learn about a topic, simply forge ahead and read about it. We have worked to make it particularly easy to explore the topics that are of most interest to your situation.

Source: leanproduction.com